Reepham
is one of those fine, tiny Norfolk towns that must once
have been fiercely independent, in the days before there
were commuters, and before shoppers could easily drive to
the nearest edge-of-the-city supermarket. It has two
churches in its churchyard, one hiding behind the other.
Once there were three - the remains of the third are
still apparent and easily found.

Reepham's
three-in-one churchyard is very central, overlooking the
little market place. How did it come to be home to three
churches? Churches sharing churchyards is not that
uncommon; there are at least a dozen examples in East
Anglia, and there were once more. To understand why, we
need to consider the difference between a parish and its
town or village; we also need to consider the medieval
functions of a parish church.

The English
parish system is ancient, dating back to Saxon times. In
East Anglia more than in most regions, the ecclesiastical
parishes pretty much reflect what was there a thousand
years ago, apart from the tidying up and rationalisation
that have occured from time to time. Parishes are areas
of land, most commonly about ten square miles, and they
share contiguous borders - that is to say, there are no
gaps between them. It is always possible to step from one
parish into another. Everywhere in England is within a
Church of England parish.

The great
majority of parishes contain a single large settlement
within their boundaries, which shares the parish name. To
look at them on a map, you could be fooled into thinking
that the parish has grown up around the settlement; but
of course, this is not the case. Settlements occur
naturally and organically over the centuries, almost
always for economic reasons. Some parishes have more than
one significant settlement, and very occasionally the
largest settlement does not share the name of the parish.

Above all, a
medieval church is a parish church, not a
village church. It just so happens that most of them are
in the main settlement of the parish; but in Norfolk and
Suffolk more than in most places, a significant minority
are outside the village of their parish name. And while
we may assume that the settlement will be near the middle
of the parish, there are plenty of examples where this is
not the case at all. Often, it will be towards the edge;
sometimes, the main settlements in two adjacent parishes
will be joined on to each other, and when this happens it
may have been found convenient in ancient times for the
two parish churches to share consecrated ground. On a
rare occasion, the settlements of three parishes
may be adjacent - and this is what happened at Reepham.

The three
churches here were all hard against their parish
boundaries, although not actually joined on to each
other. You might think this would make the holding of
concurrent services awkward, but we need to remember
that, at the time they were built, they were not used for
'services' in the way that we would understand the word
to day. After all, they were not built as Anglican
churches at all, but as Catholic churches, and at a time
when congregational, corporate worship was a minor part
of the life of the Church, if it existed at all. As I
explored on the introduction to Cawston and Salle, a church building was designed to
allow private devotions, the administration of
sacraments, Masses to be said at different altars by
different priests, and so on. Worship was active and
communitarian, rather than passive and congregational.
Medieval churches were busy places, and this would be the
case whether or not all these activities were happening
in a single building or in two, or even three.

It was only
after the Reformation, with the advent of divine service
at prescribed times, that churches sharing churchyards
became problematic. If they also shared a Rector (as
increasingly happened) then it made good sense to take
down one building and just use the other. Hackford
church's demise is attributed to a fire in 1546, but this
date looks suspiciously similar to that of the many
examples of churches derelicted by the protestant
reformers. Most often, churches served by monasteries
were taken down and cannibalised for their building
materials. We know that masonry from Hackford church was
used in the expansion of Whitwell church.

So Hackford
church was lost; but the two other buildings underwent
all the considerable changes that the protestant
Reformation and the subsequent years of conflict could
bring. When the Church of England entered its century of
torpor in the 1700s they probably settled down with a
quiet sigh of relief, but the 19th century Anglican
revival brought new challenges and changes, and both
churches underwent major restorations and rebuildings.

The two
surviving churches remained in separate parishes up into
the 1930s, but this was increasingly an anomaly, and it
was probably only the revival that allowed them to
sustain this for so long. In 1970, Whitwell church was at
last declared redundant, and became the parish hall; a
happy outcome for the town, and in reality no more than
just another reinvention of this once-medieval building.